I don't deny the charge. Indeed, the only way in which I know a Six Foot Turkey blog post has formed in my brain is when I suddenly (and this usually only happens when I am in the shower or driving) see illuminated, as if by flaring lanterns, the path leading me from one passage to another of seemingly diverse material.
The ideal-type of post is therefore something like April 2018's entry "Experience," in which I say: here's a bunch of very different people who have all said something like X. And here's a bunch of other very different people who have all said Y. It turns out: they're both right. Dialectic. Boom! (Not that I really care, since the fun of the thing was in putting the Xs and Ys together, and whatever conclusion we may draw from it is irrelevant. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis just provides a convenient ready-made structure.)
All of which means that me having something I want to say in my own words has never once been sufficient to prompt me to write a post. It is at best incidental. To be sure, once thought, the idea will lodge itself in my subconscious and—like plastic litter in a stream—begin to attach to itself various branches and leaves that float its way. But it is only after I have accumulated enough of these other scraps that the whole accumulation can dislodge itself and flow outward into written expression.
An idea on its own does not a Six Foot Turkey post make, that is; it requires an accretion of at least two literary quotes or personal anecdotes illustrating the same point for it to blossom into print. And, truth be told, I'm usually more satisfied in my heart with the accretion than I am with the idea. What most people would take to be the actual heart of the authorial enterprise—i.e., having something to say for oneself—is to me secondary to the act of lovingly rearranging my clippings from the work of others.
There is lurking always in this blog, that is to say, a perilous temptation toward mere literary scrapbooking. The blog is a kind of commonplace book struggling into being, despite my pretense of producing original prose.
But while all of this may be true—my friend may have accurately described my method—I take comfort in the thought that some version of this procedure may be intrinsic to the creative enterprise in any form. Even the highest and the freest flights of imagination may, that is to say, simply be a higher form of this same accumulating and agglutinating process—this picking up of disparate things and joining them together again in newfound ways. Creativity as collage.
Let us observe, if you don't believe me, a couple of renowned creatives at work. No one could accuse Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, of being derivative and a plagiarist. In his works, he is notoriously hard on authors who rely overmuch on quotations—particularly the use of portentous borrowed phrases as titles (which becomes an inside joke in Pale Fire, the title of which is itself lifted from Shakespeare).
Yet, when it comes time in an interview to describe his creative procedure, we discover that he is in many ways just a higher-order sort of scrapbooker. He depicts himself in one interview as a literary wren, gathering up bits and pieces in order to build something by pre-conscious instinct: "[A]t a very early stage of [a] novel's development," he says, "I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it."
Coleridge, let it be known, similarly had resort to ornithological metaphors when trying to depict his creative methods. In one highly-quotable letter, he described himself as a "library cormorant."
Now, I don't know enough about cormorants to know whether they are particularly skilled at building nests, or whether they have nests at all; and what Coleridge seemed to be driving at here was more the idea that he devours all books in his path indifferently. But the images of Nabokov ingesting pebbles and Coleridge consuming volumes share a family resemblance. ("This thing is like that; and that is like this.")
More to the point—my knowledge of Coleridge's letter comes from a book that, perhaps more than any other work ever penned, dives deep into the unglamorous inner workings of the creative process, and emerges to show how fundamentally agglutinative an enterprise it is: John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu. Lowes sets as his glorious task the retracing of Coleridge's reading, in an effort to discover how the various odds-and-ends the poet found in the course of it were recombined into the elements that would form his most beloved works. In the process, Lowes reaches a conclusion highly congenial to the thesis of this post.
Lowes suggests, in short, that not merely some, but all creative work begins with a process of agglutination (though—crucially—it does not end there). For many writers, the objects they pick up and rearrange into new shapes are found in part at least in speech and experience; which is why we often cannot track down the originals. But we have a unique case in Coleridge, for his life was so profoundly shaped by libraries and books—by deep immersion, moreover, in works that are still largely extant.
Moreover, as Lowes discovered, Coleridge had left behind signposts to his reading in a notebook. And so Lowes was able to go back over his tracks, plowing through the same literature of exploration and adventure and voyaging that haunted Coleridge's subconscious, and to see the process of creative accumulation and rearranging as it occurred.
Lowes' contention is scarcely that Coleridge borrowed intentionally or consciously from these books (even as he uncovers one instance after another in which Coleridge clearly derived a favorite image or phrase from one of these works of exploration). His point is that, because of the abundant record of his reading that Coleridge left behind, we are privileged to glimpse here a version of the same subconscious amalgamation and accumulation of oddments that precedes any creative work.
Much as Nabokov picked up bits of straw and fluff, that is to say, Coleridge mined for nuggets deep in the library stacks, and filed away his discoveries in the subconscious, where they were transformed by interaction with the other elements he had already stowed there, and later re-emerged when it came time to begin the conscious process of composition. In Lowes' memorable terminology, he would submerge literary gleanings in an unconscious "Well," and later rearrange them under the more conscious direction of the "shaping spirit"—both subconscious and conscious processes being necessary to the completed work.
If we prefer Nabokov's metaphor, we could say that there comes a time when the wren must regurgitate the swallowed pebble, and begin to fold it into the structure of the nest.
We may take any number of lessons from this; but one of the most important is that we need to rethink how hard and fast the line can be drawn between "derivation" and "originality." There may, if Lowes is correct, be no such thing as a wholly "original" creative work. For the practice of creativity may lie precisely in the recombination of preexisting materials.
Modern writers, following Claude Lévi-Strauss, seem to be gesturing toward something similar when they describe the process of bricolage. Marshall Ganz, for instance, writing about the use of creative methods in a quite different branch of human endeavor—i.e., the development of strategy in an organizational setting—associates bricolage with the capacity for "analogical" thinking, and labels both as core constituent parts of the creative process.
To create, therefore, is in part at least the ability to put different things next to each other, and to say: "See: this one is like that one, and that one is like this one."
To say that a work is original or creative, therefore, cannot be quite the same thing as saying that it has no predecessors. On the other hand—and even more plainly—there are things in this world that may indeed be fairly characterized as uncreative and derivative—works, that is, in which the process of mere accumulation and assemblage is displayed a little too nakedly before us, with too little justification to connect the assorted items.
In his biography of Hugh MacDiarmid, for instance, Alan Bold notes that some of the Scottish master's later "poetry" at times amounted to little more than copying out extended passages from various scientific treatises of the day.
No one could be satisfied with this as art, or with any procedure in which diverse items and literary gleanings are simply laid before the reader with no connective tissue between them. The act of creation must therefore involve something more than merely the swallowing and regurgitating of pebbles. There must also be some kind of digestive process that occurs while the pebble is inside the wren.
But Lowes has an equally handy and vivid way of accounting for this too. The important thing, he notes, is that the accumulated material must spend a significant amount of time inside "the Well." If, when it emerges, it has been meaningfully transformed by contact with the other elements in the subconscious, then an act of creation has taken place. But if it is retrieved too soon, alas, it will appear substantially the same—undigested—as how it first went down (MacDiarmid's wholesale quotation from scientific works being examples of the latter).
It is by this method, Lowes suggests, that we can differentiate genuine creative agglutination from its near-cousin, which Lowes dubs "mechanical joinery" (what we called at the outset the peril of "mere scrapbooking"). And both real creativity and joinery, for what it's worth, Lowes finds in the works of the master Coleridge. Even the best of us, perhaps, is not entirely immune from the latter peril (which is also why the above is not intended to reflect ill on MacDiarmid's other works).
I'm sure that on this blog, I too have done my share of mere "joinery." I can tell—as the readers probably can as well—when I have consciously forced a connection between two things, simply because I find them both interesting and want an excuse to talk about them. And I know at once the difference between this never-quite-satisfying procedure, and the pure bliss of inspiration—the moment of seeing the path, suddenly illuminated, that reveals to me the means of getting from point A to point B.
But the rub is that merely to show that agglutination has taken place cannot itself impugn a work—for agglutination is the key to all creative effort in the first place (Lowes even tracks down a similar procedure in as far a field as mathematics, for he quotes Poincaré as attesting that a large part of his own creative methodology consists in finding and making new mental "combinations" by "sudden illumination")—and, more grandly still, it may be even the key to the meaning of life itself.
This latter suggestion is (once again) not exclusively my own (as we have been laboring to say—little is or can be). Nabokov implies such a possibility in the aforementioned Pale Fire. Let us turn there in closing, as a final tuft and twig to add to the nest I have been building in this post.
Within the poem that makes up one part of Pale Fire's wholly sui generis structure, (wait, on my own theory, can any creative work be "wholly" sui generis? Never mind; let it go), the fictional John Shade struggles to find meaning after the death of a loved one. He flirts with the possibility of a post-mortal existence. After experiencing a heart attack himself, for instance, he falls unconscious and glimpses a vision of a fountain. Later, he becomes briefly convinced that he may have been witness in this moment to a genuine metaphysical reality, after he reads in a magazine story about a woman who likewise returned from clinical death with an account of seeing a fountain.
After driving out to meet her, however, Shade discovers to his dismay that what she really had seen was a "mountain," and the magazine had misreported it. "Life Everlasting," he wails, "—based on a misprint!" But next, Shade thinks, perhaps the connection he made was not meaningless, even if it occurred only in his own mind. "Yes!" he thinks to himself: "It sufficed that I in life could find/ Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind/ Of correlated pattern in the game [...]"
Here he is describing, once again, nothing other than the creative agglutination that we have been at pains to elucidate. And his suggestion is that, even if that agglutination does not reveal metaphysical realities beyond itself, it still is. The act of creation, of bringing connective tissue between disparate things, the forging of patterns, has taken place regardless. It has whatever intrinsic value it always had, whatever causes us to want to seek it out time and again in works of art, regardless of the metaphysical background behind it.
And so I do not deny, but rather embrace, the charge of doing little more than making combinations and pointing out similarities on this blog. In my humble way, I am merely trying to offer my contribution to the great pattern-weaving enterprise that is the root of art. And, if Shade/Nabokov is onto anything at all—not just of art, but of life!
To return again to Shade's poem-within-the-novel:
I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight.
And, whatever else may be said of this blog, it is—if nothing else—a record of my own experiences of "combinational delight." May it pass on some of that same delight to others as well.
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